Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in the epistolary exchange between Diderot and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, a famed novelist and actress. In a letter to Diderot, Riccoboni criticizes the reforms outlined in Le Fils naturel and Les Entretiens, largely on the basis that they contravene the classical ideals of clarity and constancy. Drawing on her experience of the stage, she offers, time and again, the same basic argument against Diderot’s diverse proposals, namely that the theater should not become a space of indeterminacy and incompleteness. Whether in relation to sight (she claims that actors who turn their backs to the spectators or who recite from the center of the stage, rather than the foreground, are scarcely visible and thus ineffectual), or in relation to hearing (she argues that actors, were they to turn their heads while speaking, would not be heard by a quarter of the audience), she repeatedly displays an understanding of the theater as a totality, that is, as an art subjugated to an ideal of complete visibility and audibility. In his response, Diderot defends his vision of an indeterminate theater by arguing that situations in which the spectators lack a visual or textual element actually produce a greater emotional impact, because, like a sketch, they awaken the imagination: “Each actor is lost in his suffering, follows its impression, and the one whose movements I can barely see, bringing my imagination into play, pulls me in, strikes me, and saddens me, more than another whose action I can fully see.”56 Diderot’s exchange with Riccoboni thus reveals the distance that separates his conception of theater not only from the classical model but also from the kind of reenactment envisioned by Lysimond. For Lysimond, a flawless portrayal of reality is essential to capturing the integrality of a past event, thus giving it the unity and fixity necessary for it to be infinitely reiterable. In his letter to Riccoboni, Diderot likewise promotes anchoring the stage to reality, but for the inverse reason—because to do so recreates the imprecision and mutability of life itself. Both Lysimond and Diderot thus seek a greater proximity between the dramatic arts and reality, but whereas Lysimond looks to the dramatic arts to invest reality with permanence, Diderot turns to reality to endow the dramatic arts with impermanence.
Diderot’s desire to stage the fluidity of reality leads him to praise improvisation, notably as it was practiced in the commedia dell’arte. In a chapter on pantomime, he applauds the actors of the Comédie-Italienne for surrendering to the fervor of their imagination, since “that which is impromptu has a character that the rehearsed work will never have.”57 The absence of a fixed script makes it easier for the actors to identify with their characters to the degree that they forget the spectators entirely and simply act as they would in reality.58 Likewise, in Les Entretiens, Diderot argues that there exist in every performance moments that ought to be left largely unwritten, so that the participants on stage may produce their own text, one displaying all the characteristics of a sketch, since unrehearsed, undefined, and, crucially, unfinished: “screams, inarticulate sounds, broken voices, a few monosyllabic words that escape sporadically … the man jumps from one idea to another; he starts a multitude of speeches, none of which he finishes.”59 The emotional impact of such an improvised text stems first and foremost from its sincerity—in the 1750s, Diderot, like many of his contemporaries, believed heartfelt passions to be contagious—but it springs as well from the text’s volatility and indefiniteness, which cultivate the spectators’ sense that they are witnessing a truly unique, unpredictable happening. Indeed, if Diderot, in Le Fils naturel and Les Entretiens, accentuates the visuality of the theater, often at the expense of its textuality, it is partly because the script consists of the most invariable element of the theater, as well as the sole permanent one, and as such always threatens to remind the audience of the significant part played by meticulous planning and repetition in almost all performances.
In this regard, Diderot’s conception of the dramatic arts constitutes the very inverse of classical theater. In the latter, the setting is kept deliberately indeterminate, a lack that, in concert with the contrasting clarity and precision of the text, incites the spectators to imagine a complete world on stage, thus achieving the ideal of hypotyposis. Conversely, in Diderot’s ideal performance, the setting is carefully constructed, with the aim of depicting a real space, whereas the text frequently exhibits signs of opacity and incompletion, such as fractured sentences and ellipses, pointing, like a sketch, to something left unarticulated. The determinacy of the setting and the indeterminacy of the text operate jointly to inspire a new mode of reception, one in which the spectators imagine themselves within the scenic space, where they are free to converse with the play’s characters and thereby “complete” the text of the play. In his seminal Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Michael Fried studies Diderot’s reiterated descriptions in his Salons of the very same experience, wherein the philosophe enters the world of a painting and engages in a conversation with its characters.60 Fried notes that this fantasy of an absorption into the fiction rests on two main criteria. First, the fictional world must appear to the beholders sufficiently similar to their own that they may conceive themselves in it. This criterion explains Diderot’s fondness for reenactments, the closest performance to reality and the most likely therefore to serve as a catalyst and support for the beholders’ imaginations. Second, for the viewers to enter the scenic or pictorial space as characters, they must first be made to experience their exclusion from it as spectators. To that end, the world of the fiction must never acknowledge their presence, but must instead present itself as entirely self-contained, be it through the institution of the fourth wall or through the portrayal of characters so absorbed in their passions that they seem to ignore the beholders. Reenactments best fulfill this second criterion as well, insofar as they prompt the complete absorption of their participants, who identify so closely with their characters that they forget the spectators’ presence. Moreover, by accentuating their own indeterminacy and unpredictability, particularly in relation to the script, reenactments not only stimulate the spectators’ imaginations, as a sketch does, they also make it more likely that this imaginative act will consist of the self-projection identified by Fried, insofar as they induce the spectators to believe that they are the unknown observers of a chance event, rather than the intended addressees of a finished work of art.
Not surprisingly, this is precisely the experience of the lone spectator in Le Fils naturel: “the performance had been so true that, forgetting I was a spectator, and an unknown spectator, at various points I had been on the verge of leaving my place and adding a real character to the stage.”61 It is important to note that this experience differs from “sympathetic identification,” the type of reception usually associated with Diderot and bourgeois drama, in which a spectator puts him or herself in the place of a suffering protagonist.62 This mode of reception is indeed common in Diderot’s writings, as evidenced by his advocacy of ordinary protagonists (who are easier to identify with) and his unreserved praise for compassion (which, he argues, guarantees that a spectator will always take the place of the innocent sufferer and never the villain’s).63 This makes it all the more significant, then, that when faced with a reenactment, not a bourgeois drama in an official theater, the spectator of Le Fils naturel reacts differently. Rather than entering the world of the stage through a preexisting character, he is moved to do so as himself, to interact with it and its inhabitants directly, in lieu of experiencing it vicariously. The veracity of the scenic world, as well as its seeming extemporaneity, kindles in the spectator a desire to add a new character and original dialogue to the story, effectively rewriting it. Such an imaginative, participative act differs from sympathetic identification, in which the spectators’ experience is filtered through, and hence constricted by, the object of their compassion. Like Diderot in his Salons, the spectator of Le Fils naturel thus enjoys, in addition to the emotional gratification of being a character, the intellectual freedom and agency of being a participant.
In fact, as Marie-Hélène Huet argues in Rehearsing the Revolution, Diderot believed that people like to attend spectacles partly because they perceive in them the possibility of a transmutation from spectator to participant.64 As evidence, Huet quotes a passage from Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste: “The masses flock to executions to find a scene they can recount upon returning to their district. This scene or another, it matters not, so long as they get to play a role, assemble their neighbors around them, and make themselves heard.”65 Public